China

The lawyer for jailed Chinese journalist Gao Yu says the freelance reporter's health has declined since she was sentenced in April to seven years in prison for leaking state secrets. Shang Baojun, who visited Gao in Beijing No.1 Detention Center on July 28, told CPJ that Gao says she is scared she will die in prison after hearing the results of a health check.

Convincing potential sources to share information and publishing independent journalism on social media or with the help of crowd-funding are a few of the practices that are likely to suffer under a pair of new Chinese laws--one passed, one still in draft form--local journalists tell CPJ.

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This week, Washington D.C.-based Uighur journalist Shohret Hoshur, sent CPJ a message saying that on May 28 charges had finally been brought against two of his brothers, Shawket and Rehim, who have been detained since August. Hoshur, who works for the U.S.-government funded Radio Free Asia (RFA), is convinced they are being put on trial to punish him for his outspoken reporting, although officially they have been charged with "leaking state secrets," he says.

When calls for Wang Liming to be arrested were made on a forum hosted by China's state-controlled press last year, the satirical cartoonist who lampooned the Communist Party leadership decided it would be safer to stay in Japan, where he had been traveling. But while he may have avoided possible arrest, the cartoonist, known as Rebel Pepper, says he is struggling to make a living in his self-imposed exile.

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The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) just released its Annual Working Conditions Report which we have reproduced with their permission, as we have done for several years. Here's a breakdown of the FCCC's top concerns:

China, rated as the eighth most censored country in the world, in a report released by CPJ today, has long had a strong line of defense against free speech online. Its Golden Shield Project, launched by the Ministry of Public Security in 1998, relies on a combination of technology and personnel to control what can be expressed and accessed behind the Great Firewall of China.

Gao Yu was right, I was wrong. Gao, who was handed a seven-year prison sentence in a Beijing court on Friday, and I met at a conference organized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers in Paris in April 2008, a few months before the Beijing Olympic Games were to get underway. CPJ had worked hard to publicize the mistake made by the International Olympics Committee in awarding China the Games in the first place.

A verdict is expected Friday in the case of veteran journalist and staunch government critic Gao Yu. The 71-year-old freelance journalist, who writes about politics, the economy, and social trends for Chinese media in Hong Kong and overseas, was tried in November for disclosing state secrets.

In a major breach of public trust and confidence, the Chinese digital certificate authority China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) certified false credentials for numerous domains, including several owned by Google. The deliberate breach had the potential to seriously endanger vulnerable users, such as journalists communicating with sources. The breach was discovered by Google and published on its security blog on March 23. Despite this serious lapse, it appears CNNIC's authority will not be revoked, and that its credentials will continue to be trusted by almost all computers around the world.

What do Delhi, Beijing, and Villiers-sur-Marne have in common, but Ouagadougou does not? The first three recently banned access to films their governments deemed inappropriate. But a film festival in the fourth, the capital of Burkina Faso in West Africa, is stepping up security to show an acclaimed but controversial movie about Islamic militancy in neighboring Mali.